Rumsfeld's missing link

Rumsfeld's missing link

Tuesday 5 October 2004 19.48 EDT
First published on Tuesday 5 October 2004 19.48 EDT

Donald Rumsfeld was at his laconic best at a New York thinktank on Monday when he said there was no "strong, hard evidence" linking al-Qaida to Iraq. But the statement still dropped like a bombshell. This was not one of the defence secretary's famous "unknown unknowns", but a clear known, albeit unconvincingly qualified yesterday by the claim that he had been "regrettably misunderstood". Mr Rumsfeld is thankfully on his way out of the Pentagon, retiring after next month's presidential elections, whether or not George Bush beats John Kerry. But if his own career is ending, others, including Mr Bush, are likely to - and certainly should - suffer significant collateral damage from his admission.

The purported link between the fundamentalist Osama bin Laden and the secular Saddam Hussein was central to the US administration's case for war, though most experts always believed it was unlikely. Much was made of reports of a single meeting between Mohamed Atta, the leader of the 9/11 hijackers, and an Iraqi intelligence officer in Prague in April 2001, but exhaustive enquiries have produced no evidence for this. This is perhaps what Mr Rumsfeld meant when he spoke of the question having "migrated in the intelligence community over a period of a year in the most amazing way".

Equally amazingly, the defence secretary quickly issued a sort of half-retraction, noting that he had in fact spoken of a Bin Laden-Baghdad connection since September 2002 on the basis of information provided by the CIA. That sounded as if he was blaming the CIA for being wrong, as he did over the intelligence it provided on Iraq's non-existent weapons of mass destruction - the principal justification for the war. But whatever he meant, the backtracking Mr Rumsfeld did not sound remotely like a man defending the invasion of Iraq, even if, as he pointed out in his inimitably folksy way, Saddam Hussein's regime was not the "Little Sisters of the Poor".

It is quite true, as he recalled, that Iraq was on the US list of countries supporting terrorism, but so, for that matter were Iran, Syria, North Korea and Libya. It is emphatically not true that there was evidence linking it to Bin Laden or 9/11. This is worth restating now that both Mr Bush and Mr Blair are talking about fighting terrorism in Iraq. It is also worth restating because the president continues to make the connection, as he did in last week's keynote foreign policy debate against the Democratic challenger. "The enemy," Mr Bush said, "attacked us." Mr Kerry retorted: "Saddam Hussein didn't." Mr Rumsfeld, belatedly, seems to agree.